The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

In no other art can one see so clearly a distinction, even a rivalry, between the desire for pattern and the desire for personal utterance, as is disclosed by the difference between instrumental and vocal music. I think I can see an analogous distinction in painting. To me, vocal music plays the part in music that the human nude plays in painting. In both there is an essential erotic element which is always in danger of being corrupted for sexual ends but need not be and, without this element of the erotic which the human voice and the nude have contributed, both arts would be a little lifeless.

In music it is from instruments that rhythmical and tonal precision and musical structure are mostly derived so that, without them, the voice would have remained tied to im­promptu and personal expression. Singers, unchastened by the orchestral discipline, would soon lose interest in singing and wish only to show off their voices. On the other hand, the music of a dumb race who had invented instruments would be precise but dull, for the players would not know what it means to strive after expression, to make their instruments "sing." The kind of effect they would make is the kind we condemn in a pianist when we say: "He just plays the notes."

Lastly, because we do not have the voluntary control over our ears that we have over our eyes, and because musical sounds do not denote meanings like words or represent ob­jects like lines and colors, it is far harder to know what a person means, harder even for himself to know, when he says, "I like this piece of music," than when he says, "I like this book or this picture." At one extreme there is the professional musician who not only thinks clearly and completely what he hears but also recognizes the means by which the com­poser causes him so to think. This does not mean that he can judge music any better than one without his technical knowledge who has trained himself to listen and is familiar with music of all kinds. His technical knowledge is an added pleasure, perhaps, but it is not itself a musical experience. At the other extreme is the student who keeps the radio playing while he studies because he finds that a background of sound makes it easier for him to concentrate on his work. In his case the music is serving the contradictory function of preventing him from listening to anything, either to itself or to the noises in the street.

Between these two extremes, there is a way of listening which has been well described by Susanne Langer.

There is a twilight zone of musical enjoyment when

tonal appreciation is woven into daydreaming. To the

entirely uninitiated hearer it may be an aid in finding expressive forms at all, to extemporise an accompanying romance and let the music express feelings accounted for by its scenes. But to the competent it is a pitfall, because it obscures the full vital import of the music, noting only what comes handy for a purpose, and noting only what expresses attitudes and emotions the listener was familiar with before. It bars everything new and really interesting in a world, since what does not fit the petit roman is passed over, and what does fit is the dreamer's own. Above all it leads attention, not only to the music, but away from it—via the music to something else that is es­sentially an indulgence. One may spend a whole evening in this sort of dream and carry nothing away from it, no musical insight, no new feeling, and actually nothing heard.

(Feeling and Form, Chap. X.)

It is this kind of listening, surely, which is implied by the Duke in Twelfth Night, "If music be the food of love, play on," and by Cleopatra, "Give me some music—music, moody food/Of us that trade in love," and which provoked that great music-lover, Bernard Shaw, to the remark, "Music is the brandy of the damned."

ill

Shakespeare uses instrumental music for two purposes: on socially appropriate occasions, to represent the voice of this world, of collective rejoicing as in a dance, or of mourning as in a dead march and, unexpectedly, as an auditory image of a supernatural or magical world. In the last case the music generally carries the stage direction, "Solemn."

It may be direcdy the voice of Heaven, the music of the spheres heard by Pericles, the music under the earth heard by Antony's soldiers, the music which accompanies Queen Katharine's vision, or it may be commanded, either by spirits of the intermediate world like Oberon or Ariel, or by wise men like Prospero and the physicians in King hear and Peri­cles, to exert a magical influence on human beings. When doctors order music, it is, of course, made by human musi­cians, and to the healthly it may even sound "rough and woeful," but in the ears of the patient, mad Lear or un­conscious Thaisa, it seems a platonic imitation of the unheard celestial music and has a curative effect.